More Swine Flu a-coming...

They're still not doing a great job explaining why this one, in particular, matters, since most people are only having typical flu symptoms:

The virus could cause nothing more than a typical flu season for the Northern Hemisphere this winter. But many experts suspect the second wave could be more severe than an average flu season, which hospitalizes an estimated 200,000 Americans and contributes to 36,000 deaths. Because the virus is new, most people are not immune to it.

"This epidemic will transmit faster than usual, because the population is more susceptible," said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who has been helping the CDC project the severity of the upcoming wave. "It's fair to say there will be tens of millions of illnesses and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths. That's not atypical. It just depends on how many tens of thousands."

Perhaps more important, in every country where the virus has spread, it has continued to affect children and young adults much more commonly than typical flu viruses.

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Anti- Health Care Reform teabagger, who claims he was beaten while protesting a pro- health care rally, now complains that he doesn't have insurance

You may dissect the irony on your own:

Kenneth Gladney sat in a wheelchair on Pershing Avenue Saturday, his knee bandaged, holding a flag that read: "Don't Tread on Me."

Gladney, 38, was handing out the same flags after a town hall forum in Mehlville Thursday night, when, he says, he was attacked by members of the Service Employees International Union.

Less than 48 hours later, protesters gathered Saturday in front of the union's offices, many of them holding signs with a slightly different version of the message: "Don't Tread on Kenny."

Supporters cheered. [His attorney, David] Brown finished by telling the crowd that Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was recently laid off and has no health insurance.

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Palm Center: Obama defense of gay discharges contradicted by use of signing statements

The Palm center says that the president has shown no aversion to "ignoring the law" when issuing signing statement after signing statement, a la George Bush, yet continues to use this "I can't ignore the law" argument to justify why he won't simply issue a quite-legal stop loss order today ceasing the discharges of gay and lesbian service members.

TIme to come up with another excuse, I guess. Read the rest of this post...

In honor of Chris.... rich Wall Street types behaving badly

This story is from the other day, but still timely. From Page Six:

GOLDMAN Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein has warned his employees to avoid high-profile spending, as The Post reported -- but his wife evidently didn't get the memo.

Laura Blankfein and her friend Susan Friedman, wife of another Goldman honcho, Richard Friedman, caused a huge scene at Super Saturday in the Hamptons last weekend when they arrived at the event before the noon start time and balked at waiting in line with the other ticket-holders.

"Their behavior was obnoxious. They were screaming," said one witness. Blankfein said she wouldn't wait with "people who spend less money than me."

Another observer said the women were so impatient, it was as if they were waiting on line for a kidney transplant instead of a charitable designer clothing sale.

Friedman shouted at the event organizer, "You have lost so much money because of this . . . Why should we be treated like the $650 donors?"

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White House knee-caps Pelosi, defends GOP mobs

I shouldn't be surprised, yet still I continue to be. When the Democratic Speaker of the House is being attacked by the right-wing noise machine - attacked for criticizing the GOP mobs who are shutting down the Democratic health care rallies - you defend her if you're a fellow Democrat. You don't throw her under the bus and defend the teabagging mob.

At some point, with Obama dropping in the polls and nearly every White House priority seemingly skirting death before eeking out a razor-thin victory - at some point, President Obama just might need the help of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. He just might need a few friends who don't have an R after their name.

Now to the heart of the matter. Pelosi was right. And the White House is wrong. It is un-American for Republican special interests to send fake mobs to disrupt the Democratic process. To stop citizens from being able to meet with their elected officials. As Pelosi wrote this morning in USA Today:

“These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.”

Republicans think freedom of speech means they get to speak, and you get to shut up. Siding with the mobs against Pelosi is just terribly tacky, and terribly unfortunate. Read the rest of this post...

Lobster, champagne, and regular gal Sarah Palin

She's just like you and me. That is, when she's not eating one of the finest restaurants in New York City, and possibly trying to connive her way into a couple of million bucks. From the NY Social Diary, hat tip to reader David:

It was Wednesday and it was Michael’s (my note: a high end restaurant in NYC). And just who should show up the night before (Tuesday) at the town’s number one media restaurant with the husband the news has been reporting she was leaving ... but the former governor of Alaska and Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States, Sarah Palin. Ms. Palin was guest of Bob Barnett, the Washington lawyer who engineers those multi-million dollar book deals for politicians like Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton. Ms. Palin dined on Maine Lobster and quaffed champagne. She’s gonna be rich if Mr. Barnett has anything to do with it.

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McConnell compares Obama to Nixon

How's that bipartisanship going? Clearly we haven't conceded enough. Read the rest of this post...

Robert Reich on the White House/Big Pharma secret deal

While Reich seems most worried about the impact on our democracy of the government having secret-backroom deals with big business, I'm more worried about the impact of such deals - higher drug prices - which Reich also gets into:

When the industry support comes with an industry-sponsored ad campaign in favor of that legislation, the threat to democracy is even greater. Citizens end up paying for advertisements designed to persuade them that the legislation is in their interest. In this case, those payments come in the form of drug prices that will be higher than otherwise, stretching years into the future.

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Details emerge about Obama's secret death panel

It's scarier than we thought. Read the rest of this post...

GOP mob member brought gun to Dem health care reform talk

Maybe there should be a new law about carrying a concealed weapon in the presence of an elected official. It's what the GOP would do with this information. Take the issue and turn it around on your opponents. And with the GOP mobs now bringing guns to meetings with members of Congress, is it perhaps time for Democrats to take off the gloves? From the Arizona Daily Star:

Southern Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has a new loyal following — but not the one she probably hoped for when she ran for office in 2006.

Conservative activists, opposed to the Democrats’ health care proposals, are jumping at the chance to confront the second-term Democrat and vent their frustrations.

But for now Giffords is not interested in engaging with people her staff says are using “manipulation” and “racism” to spread their message.

“Yelling and screaming is counterproductive,” she told the Sierra Vista Herald at a Congress on Your Corner event last week.

There, one visitor dropped a gun at the meet n’ greet held in a Douglas Safeway, her staff says.

That has aides, who called police to the event, concerned for her safety.

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Krugman: Big government saved the economy

He says one million jobs have already been created (or saved) by the stimulus plan:

Probably the most important aspect of the government’s role in this crisis isn’t what it has done, but what it hasn’t done: unlike the private sector, the federal government hasn’t slashed spending as its income has fallen. (State and local governments are a different story.) Tax receipts are way down, but Social Security checks are still going out; Medicare is still covering hospital bills; federal employees, from judges to park rangers to soldiers, are still being paid....

In addition to having this “automatic” stabilizing effect, the government has stepped in to rescue the financial sector. You can argue (and I would) that the bailouts of financial firms could and should have been handled better, that taxpayers have paid too much and received too little. Yet it’s possible to be dissatisfied, even angry, about the way the financial bailouts have worked while acknowledging that without these bailouts things would have been much worse.

The point is that this time, unlike in the 1930s, the government didn’t take a hands-off attitude while much of the banking system collapsed. And that’s another reason we’re not living through Great Depression II.

Last and probably least, but by no means trivial, have been the deliberate efforts of the government to pump up the economy. From the beginning, I argued that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, was too small. Nonetheless, reasonable estimates suggest that around a million more Americans are working now than would have been employed without that plan — a number that will grow over time — and that the stimulus has played a significant role in pulling the economy out of its free fall.

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David Brooks suggests that Palin and GOP leadership are "crazies"

Possibly the only thing that might save health care reform is just how inept the enemy really is. Greg Sargent notes that conservative columnist David Brooks just called Sarah Palin and the GOP leadership "crazies" for espousing the notion that Obama's health care plan will establish death panels that will decide which citizens will be euthanized. That won't go over very well in crazy land. Read the rest of this post...

Schumer is ready to give up bipartisanship by Sept. 15th because "you know, delay, delay, delay, you lose any momentum whatsoever."

Delay, delay, delay has been the mantra of the Blue Dogs and Max Baucus. Look where that's gotten us. (Well, that and the lack of an effective message.) Chuck Schumer is sticking with the September 15th deadline for results from the Baucus-led (but Mitch McConnell-controlled) "gang of six" in the Senate:

“If they can’t do it by Sept. 15th, I think the overwhelming view on the Democratic side is going to be, then, they’re never going to get it done,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, observed in a separate interview. “And there’s always a worry that, you know, delay, delay, delay, you lose any momentum whatsoever.”

The big question is whether the delaying tactics already worked.

This is also starting to sound worrisome, because Schumer has been a stalwart defender of a real public option:

On the “public option,” Mr. Schumer said, “if you call it a co-op but it meets certain criteria — it’s available on Day 1, it’s available to everybody, it has the strength to go up against the big insurance companies and the big suppliers to bring down prices — fine.

“If it’s going to be a measly little thing that’s just a fig leaf, not fine,” Mr. Schumer said. The rising din at constituent meetings makes it tougher for Senators Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, all Republicans, to embrace and explain even fig leaves.

Sounds like "a fig leaf" is the best we could ever expect from the "gang of six" -- and that's still a big reach. So, why are the Democrats waiting til September 15th?

We keep hearing that we should just wait til the conference committee once the House and Senate bills are passed. That's going to solve everything. Of course, the people who devised that scenario are the same people (Emanuel and Messina) who've gotten us into the current mess. Read the rest of this post...

Lindsey Graham: No one fears taking on Obama

Ezra interviews GOP Senator Lindsey Graham:

EZRA KLEIN: The negotiations in the Senate are becoming more poisonous. One of the difficulties, though, has been that people are having trouble distinguishing between those who want to strike a deal on health-care reform and those who really want to kill the bill. How do you tell the difference between a senator looking for Obama's "waterloo" and people who want their ideas more developed in the legislation?

LINDSEY GRAHAM: I think that over time you'll tell them apart. You gotta flush them out. There's two ways to fix a hard problem in Washington. You make people afraid of opposing you or you get them rewarded for helping you. There's no fear for opposing Obama's public option, and the reward is for opposing it. Right now, Republicans feel no political exposure from opposing the president's health-care initiative.

No one does. And that's the problem. The White House, for a while now, has seemed awfully fixated on making Republicans like them, and making Democrats feel unneeded (well, that's not entirely true - I hear the White House does threaten liberal groups, telling them to toe the official line, lest they be defunded like Obama defunded the 527s during the campaign). It's a great recipe for building a GOP coalition - sucking up to the GOP and ticking off your own party - but it's not so great if you want to actually win battles, for the simple fact that the GOP is in the minority. And this, of course, ignore the rather crucial point that the GOP is also dead wrong on all of these issues, so any compromise that gets them on board is generally flawed from the start (think $300+ billion tax cuts in the stimulus package). Read the rest of this post...

Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

D.C. has emptied out -- or is starting to empty out. The Senate and House are both in recess. And, as everyone knows, neither body finished the health insurance reform legislation. Nope. Conservative Democrats slowed down the process -- and the White House let them. It's bizarre (and disturbing) how much power the Obama administration has ceded to Senator Max Bsucus and the Blue Dogs.

The President is in Mexico today with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. NPR just told me it's the "Three Amigos" summit. It's a quick one. Obama is back in D.C. tonight. He's got a lot of work to do. That includes salvaging health insurance reform. Again, nice work by Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina cutting a sweetheart deal with the drug industry lobbyists (then getting busted for it by the head drug industry lobbyist, Billy Tauzin.) That's good for the Obama brand. What did we learn from the Obama brain trust last week? Drug industry lobbyist = good; Liberal groups that support Obama's stated agenda = bad. That says a lot about the current state of affairs.

Let's get it started... Read the rest of this post...